Products have long been marked with digital codes that may be read by a scanner to determine characteristics of the product. For example, barcodes encoded with the SKU of a product are used in connection with point of sale scanners to electronically calculate the prices of goods being purchased. More recently, three-dimensional digital codes such as QR codes, RFID, or the like have been marked on products to encode both details about the nature of the product as well as the address, or URL, of a website located on the Internet which may contain additional information relating to the product. Mobile electronic devices, such as cell phones in particular, may be provided with applications (apps) which allow the devices to scan appropriate digital barcodes and use that information to contact the website containing the information relating to the product.
The information encoded in a website which is contacted by scanning such a barcode is generally generic to the particular product, with all products of that class bearing the same digital code. For example, if a food product contains a QR code that may be scanned to put the user in contact with a website including nutritional information relating to that food product, all possessors of containers of the food product will receive the same message when their products are scanned to contact that website.